From Yellow Pages to Google My Hospital

Healthcare organizations have always had a challenge keeping their location, service and department information accurate and up-to-date in directories, whether it’s in the Yellow Pages or Google’s search engine. HCCG Inc President Cynthia Newton joins the Get Social Health podcast to bring us up-to-date on why hospitals are still spending many thousands of dollars on their Yellow Pages accounts every year. To compound the challenges, Google local brings a whole new level of complexity to managing their data. Hospitals and large physician practices have so many phone numbers, addresses and physician contact information to manage that it’s hard to keep them straight, let alone organized and accurate. Cynthia’s company has served hundreds of healthcare clients is auditing their Yellow Pages accounts and managing their Google listings. She shares an inside look at the nitty-gritty of how to keep up with all the details of online listings. We also spoke about online physician’s directories, ratings, reviews and reputation management but our conversation ran so long I’ll bring you the rest in another episode.

Cynthia is also a Board Member of CHPRMS (Carolinas Healthcare PR & Marketing Society). Listen in to the first half of our conversation or drop in at the time stamps below:

00:00 Introduction
01:10 HCCG Founded
01:50 The skinny on Yellow Page, Super Pages
02:30 How do the Yellow Page listings work?
04:45 What is your process in managing Yellow Page adds for clients?
~09:10 Directory confusion – 100 Healthcare listings
12:00 Keeping up with the Jones’. Why are large YP contracts still a part of Healthcare budgets?
13:58 Who pays the bills?
17:02 Shifting to online directories & Google
17:55 Where do the online listings come from?
22:30 Google My Business. Claiming your business listings
25:59 Bulk account verification – Minimum of 10 locations
31:00 Recovery branded search – 75% of Google searches.
34:20 Whose information source takes precedence – Google or the location?
35:35 Wikipedia as source description
36:40 Google Plus pages – what’s up with that?
42:25 Social Media Tip: Ron Petrovich of Mayo Clinic – Take 60 seconds.